


Hello world? It's me, your biggest fuckup.

by ThisCat



Category: Girl Genius (Webcomic)
Genre: Dreen-Gift, Existential Horror, Gen, Jumping on the Bandwagon, Moral Ambiguity, POV First Person, Vague Body Horror, distant prequel, strange framing device
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-06
Updated: 2018-11-06
Packaged: 2019-08-19 14:54:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16536752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThisCat/pseuds/ThisCat
Summary: Wow. I didn't expect to get to talk to anyone again.I'm sure you're wondering how I ended up here, and by here, I mean frozen in time for centuries in the Mechanisburg underground. It's a long story, but you have the time, don't you?(Some of the Dreen-Gift aren't so lucky. Sometimes that has far-reaching consequences.)





	Hello world? It's me, your biggest fuckup.

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Gift of the Dreen](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16448273) by [phoenixyfriend](https://archiveofourown.org/users/phoenixyfriend/pseuds/phoenixyfriend). 



> Let it be clear that this is not the first thing I meant to write for this fandom. It probably shouldn't have been, since all these OCs were meant for a different, more conventional work.
> 
> But this one was much easier to write so there's that.
> 
> The idea of the Dreen-Gift isn't mine and I don't explain it well here, so you should probably read The Gift of the Dreen before you start, or at the very least pop your head in there to read the definition at the beginning of the fic. Otherwise you might be very confused.
> 
> Have you done that? Good. Enjoy.

I’m not- I don’t… know. Where to start.

I’m sorry, that doesn’t help. I just… it’s hard? For me? You understand.

Or, heh, maybe you don’t. Sorry.

This is a mess. I’m a mess. I’m not….

I should just start somewhere. Either way, it’s not like I don’t have the time. I have all the time in the goddamned world. All the time in all the goddamned worlds. Funny, isn’t it? I’m stuck like this probably forever, and it’s not even _my_ goddamned world. Fuck.

You don’t really _get_ eternity until you’re faced with it, you know. You don’t get it then either because we’re human and humans aren’t built to understand that shit, but you get enough to be terrified.

Killing me would have been a mercy, but no. My crime was too great for that, apparently.

Sorry again. I’m just a little salty.

Okay, I guess I should start with the game. Give you a little context from my point of view.

It was, like, a strategy game? I’m told it was a little like Civilization, if you’ve played that. I haven’t. I’m not actually that big on strategy games, generally, but this one was different.

It was called Battle of the Ages, which is more apt in hindsight than it was at the time to be honest. You played as this asshole leader of a small, growing nation conquering neighbor after neighbor, with your main opponent being this guy called the Ht’rok-din and his five kids who were basically subsuming everything at a dangerous rate.

Pretty typical, I think. I don’t know. Like I said, I’m not big on these things. Anyways.

What BotA had that a lot of games like that don’t was a plot, of sorts. At the very least you really got to know the characters, and they were great characters, you know? So much quality writing.

I honestly started out watching like, half a Let’s-Play on YouTube and getting obsessed before I got the game for myself. I must have played it through at least a dozen times. There were just so many paths and so many details about the characters that only came out if you made various choices and I never got them all but I read through all the options on the wiki and I read people’s theories and analyses and I wrote so much fic….

Well, you get what I mean. I knew everything there was to know about BotA.

I knew all the characters and I could stand here and talk about them for days…

Well, not talk. Think hard? I’m actually not sure how I’m getting through to you. Maybe you’re just a delusion, but you’re a nice one.

Anyways. I could talk about any of them for days, but I’ll be honest. Most of them aren’t important to this story right here. Maybe some other time.

The only ones who really matter to my personal story are the Ht’rok-din and his children: Knife, Arrow, Tine, Thorn and Spear. And the asshole you play in the game, right at the end, but he never had a name in the game because you were supposed to name him yourself.

I used to name him Dickory, because he was a dick. He had a real name in the real actual story, but I honestly just kept calling him Dickory and I’ve forgotten what his original name was.

Anyways.

You could never really _win_ against the Ht’rok-din faction. That’s an important thing to note. You could beat them back and stop them from growing, and you kind of had to if you wanted to win the game, but you could never completely beat them. There would always be someone left alive and they would always still have power over their capital. Something about fanatical loyalty in the locals and an unbeatable power source in their possession.

The Ht’rok-din himself was something of a mad scientist. Well, they all were. It was that kind of game, but the big guy, he was really nuts, but he was also a surprisingly good parent and a good ruler, which might explain some of the fanatical loyalty.

I learned what all that was _really_ about later, of course, but still.

In the game, you had the chance to kill the Ht’rok-din pretty early on, and strategically you really should. It didn’t make that much of a difference, because his kids would just take over almost immediately, but while he was around, everything moved so much faster and you’d be overwhelmed pretty quickly unless you were good. BotA didn’t really have difficulty settings, but the fans tended to talk about keeping the Ht’rok-din alive as the ‘hard-mode route’.

Knife was the elder son. He was the one who usually took over if their father died, but he was never that much of a factor until halfway through the game, where he started constructing the castle. Strategically, killing him before the castle was done should have been a good idea, because Knife’s finished fortifications were much harder to break through than the earlier ones. There were better strategic reasons not to kill him, though.

Character-wise he was… nice isn’t the right word. None of them were, but he was shown as the cool older brother type, you know? Everyone liked Knife.

Arrow was the second child, and she had a few different routes depending on what you did. She almost never showed up in gameplay outside of providing her siblings with weapons every now and then, but you’d get a chance for a last attack near the end of the game where you’d break into the castle and be able to kill her. It was an important moment in the game, because if you hadn’t killed enough of them until that point, that was your last chance to grab a win.

The biggest problem with Arrow, though, was that if you somehow killed everyone else, leaving only her left, the game became unbeatable. She was affectionally called the secret last boss, because she would somehow wipe your army off the map out of rage. Also, if Knife died before her, she took over control of everything and got a much larger role, which is why keeping Knife alive was always a good idea. If you didn’t manage to kill her at the last attack, the army _still_ got nearly unbeatable.

Arrow was badass. In my opinion. A lot of fans didn’t like her, which I get, but I think she was cool.

I thought that even before I met her in person, but like, uh. We’re still talking about the game. Right.

In-game, she was reclusive and didn’t care much for the world outside her family. She did the fighting when she had to, but found it more of a chore than anything else.

Tine and Thorn were the only kids who shared a mother. Twins, of course, though only Thorn ever really showed up, because Tine always died early on. She did something she shouldn’t to the faction’s power source. I got the details later on, and, well, it wasn’t pretty.

Tine’s death is really what kicked off the rest of the game, through a series of ridiculous events, but other than that, she doesn’t have much of an influence on anything, which is really one of the bigger criticisms the game got and so many of the fic are just fix-its where Tine doesn’t die, but whatever. Tine died. Thorn worked on agriculture stuff, mostly? In the game he was always surrounded by plants and/or animals, in any case, and like Knife he never really affected their firepower much, but the longer he stayed alive, the better their fortifications got, because they relied less on outside sources for food.

His in-game personality was somewhat obsessive, but it was also clear that he spent most of the first part of the game working through the grief over the loss of his twin sister, and later he lost himself to his work. He was one of the more complex characters in the game.

Spear was the youngest, and probably the easiest to kill, so unless you really wanted more of his dialogue options you’d usually get him early on. The longer he stayed alive, the stronger and more monstrous the army got, and his personality was… somewhere between manic and maniacal? He was honestly the most stereotypical mad scientist of the bunch. I played a ton of games where I kept him alive just because I thought he was hilarious.

Not that he wasn’t hilarious in person, it’s just… god. Fuck.

I don’t even- They never even said why I was there? Right? Like, why me? What was I supposed to do? What did they want from me?

Did they just think it was fun to watch me flail around helplessly, because in that case they sure got what they fucking wanted.

I was very confused in the beginning. And scared. Not properly scared. If I had known where it was all going… fuck, I wouldn’t have been functional at all, but I was still scared, you know?

I still… sometimes I think I could’ve saved him. There must have been a _way_ , right?

Shit.

Fuck. Sorry. The game.

The golden ending included killing everyone except Thorn, but you had to go in a very specific order to manage that, to trigger the right events, and it involved getting Arrow in charge very early on which made everything so much harder. I did manage it once, but I had to use a guide.

The true ending involved only Knife and possibly Thorn alive at the end, and was much easier to get to. I got it on my first playthrough, and then another couple times on accident. It just wasn’t that interesting, plot-wise, and to be honest? I liked trying to keep as many of them alive as possible.

Did I lose a lot on purpose because I couldn’t stand having Dickory win against characters I actually cared about? Yes. Yes I did.

It was just a _game_ , dammit. It shouldn’t have mattered.

I’m still gonna stick to that. It really was just a game to me, before it wasn’t. I never had issues telling apart fiction and reality. I made up imaginary friends when I was three because I wanted to, but I never believed in them, never confused fictional and real people, hell, I rarely even let different fictional universes mix in my mind. I knew what belonged where.

I mean, for fuck’s sake. I’m a _writer_. I don’t think about characters as people, I think about them in terms of character arcs and -voice and -traits and -development. They’re _characters_. I loved them, but they weren’t real.

Until they were.

I don’t know why those things, the dreen, I don’t know why they picked me.

Sure, I was a big fan of the game, but I was hardly the only one, you know? There were definitely at least thousands of people out there who could’ve taken my place. Maybe millions, I don’t know.

They picked me, though.

Dragged me right out of my own house, out of my life and dropped me into this place with minimal explanation.

Creepy fuckers.

I hope that at least this version of me is just a copy or some shit, so I didn’t just randomly go missing from my actual life, but hell if I trust the fuckers to be that kind about it.

Anyways. So.

You need more context before we start the actual story?

I’m Norwegian, but speak English pretty fluently, which really doesn’t matter because it’s not like either language was going to help me. I was in my early twenties when the whole clusterfuck started, and quite a bit older by the time it ended. I call it a clusterfuck. Hah. It was almost a third of my life. I’m female and heterosexual within one standard deviation, and I’m the kind of geek who would say something like that.

I’m good with numbers, good with words, good at understanding people and not so good at talking to them. I love my sister and my parents and I hope they didn’t lose me. I deal with depression and anxiety sometimes, not in huge amounts but like, enough. More than enough.

I was never suicidal, to say it like that. Now might be a different matter, but the point is moot now anyways so.

I bet immortality is fine if you can enjoy it. It’s not that I want to die, I just want this to end, if you get me?

God, you didn’t come here to hear me whine.

Well, maybe you did. I don’t know why you came here. I don’t know if you actually have any choice in listening to this, either, but hey, I try.

I don’t know.

You’re probably a delusion.

Where was I?

Right, little me, used to have a normal life until I was bodily torn out of it by extradimensional creeps and plopped into a world that was exactly like my favourite video game.

I mean, hell. I’ve read fic like that.

You know, I’m pretty sure the spot where they dropped me isn’t that far from here. There was a castle built in the meantime and all, but like, you think they knew?

I wouldn’t put it past them. Drop a kid right on top of the place where she’ll be doomed to spend eternity when she inevitably fucks up.

Fuck!

They dropped me right out of the sky. Not from very high up, luckily, or I’d have died, but still. It was raining too. Like, a lot. The ground was muddy and it was cold and dark and very very wet, and I hit the ground pretty hard.

At least no one could see me through the rain, which I guess was kind of the point probably.

The creepy time fuckers explained… well, they didn’t really explain shit. They explained some? Some things. Enough that I knew where I was supposed to be and that stuff, but like, at the time, I was pretty sure it was some sort of vivid dream.

I never got dreams that vivid, before, nor as coherent, but I’d just been torn out of my universe by time fuckers and tossed into a game. It being a dream or some sort of really uncomfortable hallucination was the only explanation I could think of.

Anyways, it was dark and cold and I was in pain and standing on muddy grass on some sort of hill, and there was a light right above me on that hill so I walked in that direction because it was the only thing I could see.

I ran into people pretty quickly, walking down from that light on the hill, and when I called out to them to ask for help, they didn’t speak any kind of language I recognized. Like, literally, I was pretty sure it was Germanic in origin and that was all I could tell. Alternate universe aside, this was a long time ago. Neither of the languages I spoke had even really developed yet, and I’m still not entirely sure what the Dyne Hill people spoke. Possibly some kind of Romanian predecessor, but you know, probably not.

It wasn’t named Mechanisburg yet, by the way. That happened way, way later. I think burg is the German word for castle or fortress something, or mountain or sometimes just settlement, but in the case of Mechanisburg, it means castle. Or fortress. Languages are dumb.

Okay so later it became pretty clear that the light on top the hill was the Dyne shining out through the first fortifications Knife built around it as a breakthrough project. You know what a breakthrough project is, right? When the mad science instincts roar to life and all that. I’m just gonna assume you know about that stuff. You seem like a knowledgeable delusion.

The people I met on the hill were just heading back down from paying their respects to their leader and pseudo-god, and when they found a weirdly-dressed girl spouting gibberish in the rain, they were nice enough to bring her back to their home.

I’m still grateful for that. Whatever other bullshit happened, those two were genuinely kind and selfless people, and I wish I’d been able to do more for them.

I mean, I did sacrifice my mortality and sanity and everything else to kickstart their town prospering for hundreds of years, so maybe that’s enough. It doesn’t feel like enough. It just feels like a clusterfuck.

They brought me home, because they weren’t about to bother the Ht’rok-din family about me, understandably, and it wasn’t a big home, but it was warm and dry and there was a fire.

I cried a lot that first while. I don’t cry easily. Well. I don’t cry at all now, but I didn’t use to cry easily. Apparently, being lost infinitely far away from home in a place where you didn’t speak a lick of the language was more than enough to make me bawl like a child for hours on end.

It’s not like I didn’t know where I was, technically. The time bastards explained that well enough. Mostly I just didn’t want to believe it.

It wasn’t real, right? I think most people would need a lot of evidence to believe fictional things were suddenly real, or maybe that’s just me, but either way I didn’t want to believe it, and my thoughts shied away from the concept the moment I got close to thinking about it. I was lost, I was alone, nothing around me made sense and I would never, ever be able to go home.

You know that feeling you get when you’ve fucked up or something has happened and something is broken and it can never, ever be fixed? Yeah, that was me, in the worst way, all the time.

Not a lot happened the first week or so. I got used to living with the people who picked me up while I slowly tried to put the pieces of myself back together, and I ignored… so much. So many impossible things were ignored entirely because just the thought of where I was hurt me.

Not even just the big stuff like the monsters or the light on the hill or the weird weapons lying around, but things like the night sky. Once the clouds cleared up, the night sky shone with a billion stars.

I didn’t actually ignore the stars. I watched in awe whenever I had the chance, but I ignored… the implications, I suppose. I ignored the reasons there wasn’t enough light pollution to block them out.

I don’t know how long I went like that. I tried to help where I can, to do something with myself and because I owed them that, and they always found something for me to do, but I was probably still more in the way than anything. Long enough to learn a few basic phrases of the language and to communicate my name.

A name. Not my real name.

In hindsight I don’t know why I didn’t just give my real name. Maybe I had some idea that the person I was before wasn’t supposed to be there. Or something. I don’t know.

Anyways, I called myself Denkatt, as a reference to my old internet name I would never use again because there was no internet, and as a taste left over from a language I would probably never hear again.

Have you ever been in a situation where your own language just isn’t used? If you speak English as a first language, then probably not. It’s… uncomfortable. People don’t have accents because they’re not good enough at speaking or understanding a language, or because they think it’s fun. They have accents because the shapes of sound you grow up with become ingrained. No matter how familiar you get with a secondary language, it will always be harder to speak, and your first will always feel more right.

When you lose your language, you lose a part of your self, and I felt that one acutely. Even more so because I didn’t have anything to replace it with. I was language-less. I had nothing.

I called myself Denkatt, and I… settled. Somewhat.

Then the first attack happened.

I guess that was the point where I finally accepted where I was and what I was doing. It was suddenly too blindingly obvious to ignore.

It wasn’t Dickory attacking, at least. It was one of the smaller, early-game nations that would be eaten up by some other nation pretty quickly, but it was a distinct one. Mainly because of the mammoths.

I don’t fucking know why mammoths still exist in this world. Maybe some prehistoric wizard-type decided to tame them. It didn’t really matter. The point is that I remembered the mammoths from the game very clearly, and when an army attacked the people I was staying with and that army had mammoths, I couldn’t deny what was happening anymore, and I was suddenly very aware of how little time I had.

The fact that the attack happened at all told me a few different things, but mostly it gave me information as to what the real Dickory had been up to, because depending on your actions in the game, it might not even happen.

Attacking that particular nation early on was always a good idea. Because you ended up with mammoths. Which were both a great boost to the army _and_ super cool. They were kind of the unofficial mascots of the game.

Point is, the mammoths were there and I had done nothing.

I… knew. I suppose. In a way. That I was hard to damage. The dreen told me that too when they told me where they were sending me and neglected to tell me why.

Keep things on track, they said. Which track? I would have asked, but I didn’t get the chance. Oh well.

I knew I was, if not immortal, then close. Intellectually? With the certainty that it was all a dream kind of lying on top, and you know, _knowing_ you’re invulnerable doesn’t mean you’re eager to get stabbed.

I don’t- Um.

I’m not giving a very good description of the order of events.

Okay, so I woke up before sunrise to a ton of noise, and found that people around me were grabbing weapons in response to shouts from outside. I, of course, had no idea what was going on, but someone handed me a club and ushered me outside, and I ran out without my shoes or socks or anything.

It wasn’t wet anymore, since it hadn’t rained in a few days, but it was still cold as fuck, let me just have that said.

I ran out to find people organizing into armed groups ready to fight, while most of the women and children were moving away, probably to a safer shelter than the village. I ended up at the back of the group of non-combatants, and since I could hardly ask anyone what was going on, I did my best to find out for myself.

So, it was dark, but not night black anymore. We saw by the dim grey light of morning. We were also on a hill, as I’ve probably mentioned, which gave us a pretty good view of everything else, and now there were fires in the valley. Lots of them. A little as if there was an army with torches approaching, which is of course exactly what was going on.

We couldn’t see the shapes of the people under the torches very well yet, though the rapidly improving light conditions would soon remedy that, but the mammoths were hard to miss, and after that I felt like, well. Hmm. I couldn’t do nothing, at least. Bad enough I was trapped here if it was all in vain as well.

I should… hmm. I should probably explain my train of thought from here on out.

I didn’t know what I was meant to do. I didn’t know what ‘on track’ meant and I didn’t know why it was even necessary for me to be there to change things, or which things I was supposed to change, or if there was even a point at all. For all I knew, this was a dreen reality show, where they tossed a random fan into a fictional world and then grabbed the popcorn.

Also, fictional?

I mean, the world was real enough to me. I could feel things and do things and my actions had consequences. My thought process for things like this is mainly that the world exists if I am in it, and if it is fictional after all, it’s still real to me. I wasn’t about to think about the people around me as if they were characters in a story.

In the game, the Ht’rok-din and his children were enemies, and to win you needed to kill at least a few of them.

In the game, you played Dickory. Or whatever his actual name was I don’t remember. I wasn’t good with names even before all this shit, and the shit didn’t actually help.

I was not with Dickory. I was with the Dyne Hill people. Even in the game, I liked the Ht’rok-din better. My decision to help his side was based half on that partiality towards him, and half on the fact that I was there and I didn’t want to die.

Things I knew about this attack: It happened less than one in-game year after Tine’s death. The Ht’rok-din’s army was good, but not much better than the mammoth people. A lot of people would die in this battle, unless he had another advantage.

I knew enough about how this battle could go that I could give him that advantage, if I could communicate it properly.

Finding the man was easy enough. He was large and loud, shouting orders that were immediately obeyed, and he looked almost exactly like he did in the game. The communication part was harder.

Okay, getting close wasn’t too easy either, but I don’t think he was scared I had any way to harm him even if I _was_ an enemy agent of some sort.

I mean, he was at least two meters tall. He could have crushed me with a single hand.

He must have been bemused when a random girl came up and tried to talk to him without actually using any words. I was probably also incredibly rude, but he realized pretty quickly that I did have something important to say.

Say what you will about the man, but he was dangerously intelligent. They all were. Their descendants still are, last I heard. I don’t know. I don’t get a lot of news down here.

Hm. With a crude map and drawings in the dirt, I managed to communicate the tactic the enemy was likely to employ, and also that it might be possible to take the mammoths and turn them against their former masters.

It’s not as unlikely as it sounds that I managed that much. Again, the man was fucking smart, I knew exactly what things were supposed to look like because I played the game so many times, and I’m not a bad artist. I’m not _great_ , but I’m definitely not bad. I can draw someone scaling a mammoth if I have to.

I thought… I’d done pretty well. Which I guess I had, all things considered, but he, well, he didn’t immediately trust me.

I should have expected that. I knew what he was like, from the game, but I was just a little desperate and maybe panicked, and in my defence, he did trust me enough to give my proposed strategies a shot.

He just also brought me with him, probably so he could kill me immediately if it turned out I’d betrayed him.

My intention was not to end up in the middle of the fighting, but honestly, overall, my intentions ended up having very little influence on what actually ended up happening.

So uh, I should describe this. Set the mood. Put you in my shoes, or lack of them, so to say.

It was early morning, and I’d been woken up from a restless night by a giant shot of adrenaline. It was a restless night because damn near all my nights were restless back then. Anyways.

It was early morning, and I was buzzed up on panic and fight-flight response, but I was also tired in that way that makes your thoughts buzz and makes it hurt to close your eyes for too long. I was so cold I was shivering, and my bare feet hurt, touching the cold and rocky ground.

I had a wooden club in my hands. A weapon I could only use because clubs are easy to use. Right beside me was a giant of a man who could kill me in a second, and who I knew was not invested in keeping me safe. Both he and the crowd around us were loud, and with the tiredness it was almost too much, and I wanted to put my hands over my ears, but I couldn’t because we were facing an army.

The light rose, the sky turning slowly blue with bright pink wisps of clouds, and we were facing an army.

Around us grew a make-shift but dangerous battalion, down the hill was the wooden wall of Knife’s first proper fortification efforts, the wind was cold, I could smell smoke, my hair was long enough to shadow my eyes, and we were facing an army.

And then the army attacked.

I kind of wish I’d done something badass at some point, but all I did was run and duck and try not to get killed until I got stabbed.

Do you know about the quantum destabilization thing?

It’s the one thing the dreen give people like me. I think they started calling us dreen-gift or something, later on? I don’t know. The most they ever called me was oracle.

Quantum destabilization. It’s why we’re hard to damage. When in a lot of danger, we kind of phase out of reality and become intangible, which means almost any kind of danger isn’t, well, dangerous. It apparently looks a little like you’re moving and staying in place all at once, in overlapping images, or something. It’s a nice little gift to prevent us from dying before we do whatever we’re supposed to do.

You know, aside from the part where it’s extremely uncomfortable and is also used as a punishment for trying to change too much. Getting stabbed isn’t dangerous but o ho ho, I can promise it still isn’t fun.

Anyways. I got stabbed and I was fine, but everything was a bit much after that, so I curled up in a ball on the ground and rode it all out. I think a mammoth stepped on me at some point, but I’m not sure. I just remember feeling like something pulled all my atoms apart and the put them back together.

It’s not painful, exactly? It just… feels _wrong_. Really, really wrong. Kind of like choking on thin air except worse and everywhere. Kind of. I don’t know.

I was cold and stiff and too tired to be properly scared when the fighting finally died down and I found myself in the remains of a battlefield.

I kind of… zoned out. After that. I think. I really don’t remember what happened, at least.

By nightfall I wasn’t staying where I had been, anymore. I was sleeping on a mat in my own room, in the rudimentary building that would at some point in the future be expanded to become the first version of Castle Heterodyne.

It was a busy day.

Did this get too dark? It gets lighter for a while, I promise.

One thing I forgot about the game is that it sped things up a lot. It felt like there was always a battle going on, but in the reality I was now living, there were sometimes years between attacks. Years that were almost peaceful, for a strange, chaotic, sparky definition of peace.

I met the Heterodyne children. The real ones, not the characters.

I first saw Thorn and Spear trying to wrangle some of the mammoths they were now in possession of.

One of the animals tossed its head and threw Spear five meters away, and Thorn almost choked laughing.  When they saw me they managed to drag me into helping, which really didn’t do anything because I know nothing about animals and mammoths are, you can imagine, large. I think we spent hours futilely trying to get the things where we wanted them before Knife appeared with a contraption that looked like a cross between a catapult and a grab-arm.

That was how I got to know them. Thorn laughing, Spear trying ridiculous things with boundless optimism, and Knife barging in with an exasperated groan to rescue them both.

There was more to them, of course. Thorn was still rather severely depressed, though working with the animals helped. Later, when I could actually talk to them with anything but gestures, Spear told me that was the first time either of them had heard him laugh since Tine died.

And Spear, he was ridiculous, yes, but his optimism was there for a reason. Most of his ideas did actually work, once he’d tried and failed a few times, and if too many of his ideas involved creating monstrous abominations of science out of animals and sometimes people to bolster the army, he managed to make it crazy awesome enough that it somehow felt okay.

He was also only four years younger than me, was friendly and funny and most definitely attractive and I was… biased. God. I should’ve-

Fuck.

Sorry.

Knife was maybe the one who was most like their father. It might have something to do with his mother, but I never found out. They all had different mothers, which shouldn’t come as a surprise.

Knife was big and strong and liked building things. All kinds of things, but especially buildings. He was constantly getting people from the village to help work on the outer wall, and there was a couple years he went on a frenzy and rebuilt everyone’s houses. Living things didn’t interest him much, aside from making sure the mice wouldn’t be able to get in and the livestock wouldn’t be able to get out, but he could talk for hours upon hours about building materials and stone and wood and metals.

Arrow… Arrow was weird. That’s really the only way I can describe her, though I don’t mean it in a bad way, just to make that clear.

I only met her later. It’s not that she didn’t like talking to people, she just didn’t seek it out. At least not to begin with.

Arrow was always singing, except when she was listening. The first time we met, I was singing too, and she heard me and went to see what that sound was.

I like to sing lullabies. I _liked_ to sing them. I can’t really sing anymore, though I’ve gotten really good at imagining it so hard it almost feels like I can hear the music. I can’t make the actual noise anymore, which… well. I miss it.

Point is, I was singing, and she sought me out to listen.

We worked out a system pretty quickly. I would speak either of the languages I knew that she had never heard, or I would sing some song I could remember. Sometimes lullabies, sometimes just whatever. I tried Bohemian Rhapsody once. It went terribly, but it was fun. She would listen, because she liked new sounds, and then in return, she would teach me to speak their language.

She was the best language teacher I ever had. It didn’t hurt that I was so motivated, but we also didn’t have anything in common to base it off, so I’ll still give her the credit. Within a month or so, I could hold a basic conversation, and everything got easier after that.

It’s not that I stopped missing home and wishing I was somewhere where things made sense and all the other things, but at least I could talk to people. At least I had people around me who I liked. At least I had a home, had things to do with my life.

I wanted to tell them everything I knew.

I couldn’t, of course. Too much at once or the wrong things at the wrong time just… didn’t work. There’s the downside of quantum destabilization. At random times while talking I could be pulled halfway apart, halfway out of reality altogether, until they were sure I would stop.

I didn’t fight it. I hated the damn feeling. I stopped talking the instant I felt it coming, every time, at least in the beginning.

Maybe that’s why I could do what I did, later. I don’t know. At this point, I don’t think I want to know.

I mean, I’ve thought about it. A lot. But that’s just like all the other things I could’ve done differently. It’s there all the time and I don’t have anything to do other than think about it.

I got tired of that a long time ago.

Anyway.

I told them what I could, and then, slowly, over the years, we mapped out what I could say and what I couldn’t.

Life with them was….

I’m not stupid. I’m actually rather smart. IQ of 130 or something.

Yes, I know it’s not a good measure, but it doesn’t mean nothing. I’m generally an intelligent human being, and that’s not bragging. That’s just plain fact. I’m pretty smart. I’m used to understanding what the people around me are talking about.

That still sounds like bragging, doesn’t it? Sorry.

Point is, here? I didn’t. My new… I hesitate to call them family. Sometimes I felt almost like a pet. I loved them and I think they loved me, but I wasn’t really one of them. Friends? Friends.

My new friends could talk circles around me without even trying to. I knew modern science and technology better than anything they had access to, but the things they did know was… both rudimentary and incredibly advanced.

I had no idea how they did half the things they did, or what a fraction of what they talked about even meant.

They spent their days doing their things, and I would help where they asked for me.

For the old Ht’rok-din himself, that usually meant strategies, which for obvious reasons I was actually good at as long as I was allowed to talk about things. It meant maps and little carved mammoths to represent troops. It meant speculating and predicting, and often it meant clipping through the table because I said the wrong thing and suddenly I didn’t exist anymore for a moment. It also meant being dragged around to talk to people to gather information on anything and everything. It meant drilling numbers and distributions and knowing exactly what we had at hand to do what where when.

Working for Knife was hard work in a very different way. He never expected me to understand what he was doing, which paradoxically made learning to understand it a much more relaxed process. No, he just wanted me to carry things or hold them up or just in general help him build the things he so carefully designed. I did more physical labour working with Knife than I had ever done before, but once it stopped hurting so much, it was nice. He would talk, while we worked, because the construction in itself wasn’t so complicated it needed much thought. He asked about my life before all of this, and I asked about theirs, and we grew close.

As friends, only. Don’t misunderstand. He was more than a decade older than me and understood and respected that I wasn’t interested. He used to tease me about Spear, like, all the time. He was the worst. And the best.

When I curled up in a corner and cried about my parents and my sister and all my old friends, he was usually the one who knew what to say to make me feel better.

Arrow was usually the one to find me, though, at those times. I don’t think her ears were actually better than normal human ears? She was just… very good at listening. Compared to the rest of them, her work was esoteric as fuck. She did things with sound that sound was not supposed to do. Usually, working with her involved the language somehow. When it didn’t, it was… strange. Very strange.

She once made me nearly jump out a window in pure panic just by whistling at me, and then spent several weeks trying to replicate the effect. It was, ah, stressful to say the least.

She made it up to me later, once she realized she probably should.

Thorn… well, I arrived at around the same time Thorn entirely lost himself to animal husbandry. He had complicated breeding programs in place for a wide array of animals from mammoths to snails. I spent days with him working stables and wrangling various escaped individuals back to where they were supposed to be. He never talked about anything but animals and sometimes plants. I could mention one of his siblings and he would grunt an answer and then say something about how he might have to miniaturize the cattle for them to even work the way he wanted them to. He was perfectly happy talking about his work, but that was also all I ever learned about him, from him, for a long time.

It took years before he ever mentioned Tine.

I had heard about her from the others. How she was brilliant and bright, full of too many ideas to fit in her head, and then she drank something she shouldn’t and exploded.

Thorn talked about her like she was still alive, when he mentioned her. Like she’d just left the room, and would come back soon with new ideas to help whenever he was stuck. Then he would stop, and go back to talking about animals as if nothing had happened.

He talked about her like she was an extension of himself, and sometimes I missed her even though I’d never even known her.

Spear was Spear.

He build things too, but unlike Knife, the things he built were usually alive. Working with him meant being elbow-deep in something’s chest cavity while he connected veins and nerves. It meant blood and bile, knives and needles. I’m not sure what it says about me that the needles disturbed me the most, but it might just say that interesting new kinds of trauma don’t erase old phobias.

Working with Spear also meant learning that someone breaking something’s ribcage open with their bare hands could be attractive. It meant jumping from deep and serious conversation to bad puns and friendly insults in a second.

Spear was the only one who ever teased me for my accent, for how I was confused by things this world considered simple concepts, for how I never _got_ things the way they did, even though I wanted to. He was also the only one I would ever have accepted it from.

Spear built our army, one monster at a time.

Thorn fed the people, at least a little, and it was never enough and it was always getting better.

Knife built our fortifications, started on the castle, and sometimes constructed siege machines in his free time.

The Ht’rok-din strategized and watched his sons and daughter grow to be capable of one day taking his place, and Arrow… Arrow sang, and listened, and only my knowledge of what she would one day be able to do kept me from quietly agreeing when her brothers teased her for doing nothing.

And beneath our feet, history moved forward at the same pace it always does.

Once the next attack happened, they were much better prepared, and I was not part of the fighting.

It was still terrifying, to sit there in safety and know that my friends were out there fighting. It was worse knowing as much as I did about that particular battle, and also knowing that they didn’t know that much, because it was just beyond what I was allowed to tell them.

Don’t even fucking know why, I just know that trying to tell them which strategies would work and which wouldn’t was enough to send me flickering to the floor. I couldn’t even nod at their proposed plans, though I pushed that one pretty far, once I realized we were closing in on the attack.

It didn’t matter much in the end, anyway. We won, and Dickory lost. All was well.

Oh, yeah, that was the first clash with Dickory, by the way. There were still other people around at the time, but he and his army would be the biggest threat from there on out.

It was a weird situation in so many ways, but one thing that kept annoying me was that I was playing this game from the wrong side. The variables had always been on Dickory’s side, before, and trying to change things from the Ht’rok-din’s side while Dickory stayed unaffected seriously limited my knowledge of everything that was going on. It’s probably why I was allowed to be as open as I was about the things I did know.

They won the battle with minimal losses, and things got more hectic from there on out.

I don’t- hmm. I could just skip over the next couple years, I think. Did anything important happen in that period?

There were more battles, and more of them much closer than before, when most of them had been away from the Dyne Hill.

Oh, yeah, I didn’t talk about that, did I? Well, I was mostly personally affected by the battles that came to us, but the Ht’rok-din rode out fairly regularly with the army to wage war elsewhere. Raids and battles was kind of what he did. I used to advise him on which ones would end well and which wouldn’t.

That’s how I saved Spear the first three times, I think, though I’m not sure anyone realized.

Except maybe Arrow. I never knew what Arrow did and did not know.

But in the game, there were several battles where Spear could die gruesomely, and I made sure they avoided all of them. I’ll admit it wasn’t mostly for tactical reasons. You can guess why I did it.

I hope I don’t need to explain exactly what happened between me and him. Most of that was personal. I still don’t like thinking about a lot of it.

After Dickory’s first attack, the raids away from home actually decreased in frequency. Mainly because we were all to busy defending at home.

It was around the same time Thorn’s attempts at securing a stable food supply really started to pay off, and Knife started what would be the final version of the fortifications and the castle, up on the hill, so it wasn’t as big a problem as it sounds.

It was still, you know, dangerous. War tends to be.

The Ht’rok-din died.

It was… a thing.

It happened. It was….

It was a tragedy? On the other hand, we all expected it to happen sooner or later.

In the game, you had to make very specific choices _not_ to kill the man, as it went on, and as mentioned, I had no influence over Dickory. It was out of my control.

The Ht’rok-din wasn’t a young man anymore, either. He wasn’t much older than when I first met him. He was still a mountain of a man. He was still incredibly dangerous in a fight, but he was a warrior, and warriors don’t tend to grow old.

We did win that battle, by the way. Knife took the reins and rallied the troops. He was calm until he was not. He was solid and strong and everything we needed, until he had the room to break.

There was a funeral, if you want to call it that. Deep in the castle. We let the water dissolve away his body, because it felt like the only right way to send him off. It was a beautiful ceremony.

Afterwards, Arrow told me to go, and I found Knife crouched up in one of those remote corners where I used to hide away and cry when I missed my family too much.

Look, I know these people weren’t good people. I know… some? Of what their descendants have done? I know that beating them back was supposed to be a victory for a _reason_ , but… what you have to remember is, well, they were human.

They weren’t evil caricatures. Like all human beings, they had their good sides as well. They cared for their own. They _took care_ of their own, and I was one of theirs.

Call them evil if you have to. You’re probably right, but they were mine and I was theirs and they were everything I had. Of course I was biased in their favour.

I still fucking miss them, alright? They picked me up when I had nothing, and I can’t make myself care for the thousands they hurt.

Knife took over, and his siblings helped. I did what I could, but again, all I really had was uncertain knowledge I couldn’t even really share. The progress on pretty much all the projects slowed down after that.

That was around the midpoint of the game, I think. Maybe a little past it.

Things picked up speed, because that’s what things did.

The battles continued, and we threw ourselves into working to make sure we would win, in the end. At some point I managed to communicate how close we were getting to what would eventually be the decisive battle.

We finished building the fortifications. Thorn managed to set up several strange underground farms. Spear made, just, _so_ many monsters, and Arrow started arming them with little bells.

The bells freaked me out, I’ll be honest. In the game, they just did annoying things to stats. In reality, they did… things. To emotions.

Sound around Arrow didn’t really feel like sound. She could reach into your head and pull things out with only her voice. The bells were… a simplification. They were effective, but weird. She spent most of her time making them, sitting by the Dyne and humming.

Wait, did I ever talk about the Dyne?

No? Shit. I hope you know what it is already, then, or else that funeral scene must’ve been weird.

In BotA, the Ht’rok-din faction was dangerous mostly because they had this mystical power source that was never explained. In reality, it was a spring. Kind of.

It wasn’t very large and it was definitely not natural, and it wasn’t just water either. Arrow said it was made of sound, but she said that about everything. Then again, she spent like, ninety percent of her time sitting by the Dyne, so if anyone knew, it would be her. Either way it definitely wasn’t just water.

The glowing was sign enough of that. And the part where people who drank from it usually died violently.

That’s what killed Tine, by the way. Not sure I ever said.

Arrow was… just a little obsessed with making sure any descendants of her brothers would be able to handle it better. She talked to Thorn about it sometimes. How to make genetics persistent and all that. Exactly which traits she wanted to persist got more elaborate with time.

I tried to involve myself in that conversation for a while because, for a while, I thought it might be, uh, rather personally relevant to me, if you catch my drift.

Afterwards, I didn’t care too much, but that’s because afterwards, well.

Spear. Spear did a dumb thing. That’s the thing.

So, I said he made monsters.

Most of them did what he said, and made for pretty good soldiers, but some of them… well, there were always the ones who wouldn’t listen.

Which would’ve been fine? If they didn’t get problematic about it, and he decided to find ways around the disloyalty problem.

The- Okay. I didn’t approve of the mind control, exactly? But it also- look. It sounds bad.

It was bad. I mean, mind control? Yeah, I get that it was bad, but all of that shit was and I was just glad they were helping keep us all safe now!

It’s easy to judge when you’re safe at home somewhere that isn’t being attacked by armies on a regular basis. It worked, and that was the important thing.

We thought it worked.

Arrow didn’t add ‘instinctual dislike for mind control’ to the list of traits she wanted Heterodynes to have for the rest of eternity because she thought it was morally wrong. She did because, mind control? Doesn’t work.

Not for long.

And I should’ve known that. I hated poking at the restrictions the time fuckers put on me, and I still did it every now and then, because having restrictions so directly put on your actions is… can’t find the word. Infuriating. Fucked up. It makes you want to break free and kill whoever put them on you.

Which….

You ever met anyone who claims they can think completely objectively?

They’re wrong. They’re wrong, wrong, wrong. We all have internal biases.

Mine prevented me from realizing that Spear’s creations sometimes thought the same of him as I thought of the people holding my own leash.

The game was so far off the rails by then I didn’t… expect… I- fuck, I should’ve- fuck.

I miss crying.

I miss him.

I ended up in Knife’s bed pretty often after that, and no, I know how that sounds but no, literally just for the physical closeness. He was practically like a brother to me at that point. It was a different culture, okay? They weren’t as weird about physical intimacy.

I stayed away when he had women visiting to actually do that stuff, but I didn’t sleep so much those nights.

I also realize I’ve talked more about my relationship with Knife than what I had with Spear, but, look. It’s been ages, but one still hurts less than the other, okay? Call it bad storytelling if you want, it’s my fucking story and you’re probably not real.

I’m going to skip the next half year or so because none of what I can remember isn’t painful. I think there was some fighting. I was relatively useless.

By the time I started doing things again, I recognized how close we were to the end.

Of the game, that is. Not like, the world or anything.

Honestly, I wasn’t sure what of my life would actually change once the game was over. At the very least it would mark the end of my knowledge. For all I knew, it was when the dreen would judge me for my performance and, I don’t know, award me points or something? A part of me thought I’d just be sent back home, which felt more alluring now than it had a year earlier.

Either way it would be an ending, and I was determined to get there without losing anyone else. That involved two things. Keeping Knife and Thorn safe in the next several battles, and making sure no one died in the last attack.

I threw myself into getting them as much information as possible, pushing maybe a little too hard against my restrictions sometimes. It was the kind of single-minded determination you get when someone is desperate to protect the only things they have left.

I detailed the battles further than I was allowed to, toeing the line as much as I possibly could, but the last attack?

The last attack worried me. It involved the enemy breaking all the way into our home, which meant so much more to me now that it _was_ my home, and I couldn’t touch it at all. Any attempt at even mentioning the last attack rendered me incapable of speech.

I could feel it approaching, all the way in to my bones, and I could say nothing to no one.

That day….

It, uh.

It was the last day of my life.

The first day of fucking eternity.

Do I regret it? Oh yes, oh so much. Every second of my miserable existence.

I loved them, and I still do, but _nothing_ is worth this.

Okay, the attack… happened.

The castle was in an uproar of violence and confusion, and I realized what was going on pretty much immediately.

I brought a weapon slightly better than a club I barely knew how to use, shouted instructions to panicked townsfolk in a language I spoke fluently, and ran down the stairs by my own volition to meet the invaders, armed with knowledge I could not communicate and a stone cold certainty of what I had to do. It was a twisted mirror image of that first battle I saw.

I wasn’t particularly skilled with my weapon, but I was also immortal, which really puts you at an unfair advantage in a fight, let me tell you.

So my fighting skills didn’t slow me down much. What _did_ was the fact that I was apparently not supposed to intervene in this event. I kept having to deal with random quantum displacement, even when I _wasn’t_ currently being stabbed, and getting into practically any particulars when giving instructions was practically impossible.

I was. So angry.

I wasn’t just going to let them kill the only people I had left. Not when I should be able to prevent it. Not when….

In the end, I guess I had too much in common with Spear.

I did the stupid thing.

Ignored all the warning signs and kept… kept pushing. Even when it got so bad I fell through… at least one floor? Maybe two, I’m not sure. I just kept going. I don’t… I didn’t realize. Didn’t understand what I was risking.

Knew I was risking _something_. Didn’t get what. Decided I didn’t care.

I was a fucking idiot.

I just wanted to keep everyone safe, because I was human with human biases who did human mistakes, but sometimes mistakes have big fucking- fucking consequences.

Bigass fucking consequences.

I- There was always- I knew this fight.

I’d gone through it so many times I knew which players would be where when, and I knew which ones were important.

I’d never, um. I hadn’t killed anyone before. Not really.

It wasn’t as hard as you’d think.

It might have helped, actually, that I was constantly fighting my own quantum bullshit. It made the job almost impossible, and so I couldn’t focus on the morality of it while I was doing it.

Stuff like blood never really bothered me anyways, and helping Spear with his work certainly didn’t change that.

Yeah, I hunted down most of the major players and killed them in cold blood.

Don’t judge.

You don’t fucking get to judge.

It was hard as hell to get to Arrow. I don’t know why the dreen even let me get that far. Maybe they thought it was amusing, I don’t know, but I managed it. Somehow.

Arrow fighting was a strange-ass sight.

I think she had her eyes closed? I might have imagined that. The air itself was alive with sound. She didn’t have a lot of weapons, but she didn’t need them. Her voice alone sent them cowering.

There was also a huge bell there, which I don’t think she was actually finished forging, but she used it even so, running her hands over it to make it chime.

I’ve heard that bell later, even down here. It spreads the sense of doom more efficiently than any armada could.

She should have had it handled. She had them by the balls, each and every one of them, but there was this one guy.

In hindsight I think he was deaf. I don’t know why they let him in the army.

Maybe it had to do with the bells she’d already made.

He got up close. He would have killed her.

I didn’t let him.

I slid my blade between his ribs. Then I dropped my weapon. Then I was doomed.

And I’ve been standing here since, watching, listening, sensing but not breathing, not speaking, not moving at all.

You know they let me keep my hair short? People have this idea that everyone in the past were super strict about gender roles because that’s what it feels like it was like just a little bit in the past, and of course the further back you go, the worse it must have been, right?

I don’t know about other places, but at least here, that isn’t true. Wasn’t true. They let me keep my hair as short as I wanted, and now it will be short forever. Until the end of time itself.

I went crazy within the year. I went sane again within a few more.

Not like anyone noticed.

And here I am again. Crazy.

Probably.

You’re one of the nicer delusions, honestly.

Are you going to stick around?


End file.
